680x0's Journal: Ultra Update

Generally speaking, the Sun from RetroBox is in good shape. I had two issues with it, neither of which I think are worthy of trying to get an exchange or refund (I got more than my $75 worth).

1. Sticky keyboard. Some of the keys stick, and the "/" key doesn't work at all (but the one on the keypad does). Fortunately, I'm generally logging in remotely via ssh.
2. The machine came with 2 hard drives. A 9GB main drive and a 2GB second drive. The 2GB drive seems to have excessive bad sectors (at least according to fsck).

I was able to get NetBSD installed and configured last night. Today, however, I've been trying to add packages (tcsh, emacs, all my favorites). It seems NetBSD doesn't have the sparc64 versions of its binary packages (if it does, and I just haven't been looking in the right place, let me know). Instead you have to download the pkgsrc.tar.gz archive, and install all your packages from source (I feel like I'm running "Gentoo BSD").

At least it's a fairly fast Sun (compared to the 40MHz SparcStation-2's I have), so the compiles go reasonably fast.